Against Remembrance by David Rieff

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In 2010, the European Union sold almost 400 million Euros worth of arms to Libya's Gaddafi - weapons that one year later he would use against his own people and thus incur the wrath of those same Europeans who worked to hasten his downfall. But why should we care or, if we take on board much of what David Rieff has to say, why should we even bother to remember?

After all, argues Rieff, "like it or not, there must come a time when the need to get to the truth should not be assumed to trump all other considerations." As someone with firsthand experience of the horrors of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Rieff is well-placed to argue that the Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war in Bosnia is a good example. Dayton was an unjust peace that left Slobodan Milosevic, the principal architect of the war, off scot-free. But for those who had seen or experienced the death and the suffering then surely any peace, no matter how unfair, was preferable to the continuation of the slaughter.

Against Remembrance is an amazing - and controversial - book about the political philosophy and importance of collective memory. More of a polemic than an analysis, it soars across art and literature, psychology and sociology, politics and history. In short, the American author sums his argument thus:

"The romance that is historical memory is at best the candle we light in honour of the dead and, at worst, a kind of cognitive equivalent of an astrophysical black hole - a region from which no historical reason and no political sobriety can escape."

Rieff says he learnt to hate, but above all, fear collective historical memory when he was in Bosnia. Collective memory then is a modern notion, something innate to the nation-state and invariably political. It is complex and contradictory, it can invented or recovered. It is, argues Rieff, almost always dangerous.

This is not to say that we should no longer hold Anzac Day memorial events. It makes historical and ethical sense to honour the memory of the dead of Gallipoli, but with time and as societies change, then such services become redundant. Thus Rieff says there is, for example no sense in holding services to honour the dead of the Battle of Hastings in 1066 or, say, for the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE. We can study the battle or admire The Iliad - we can even be inspired by them - but such civilisations are ultimately lost.

For Rieff it is about what he calls "the acceleration of history". What he means by this is that places like Australia and the US must come to terms with the fact that it no longer makes sense to put the emphasis on a past which is no longer shared by most of the people of live there. If anything, the collective memory only serves to exclude or foster and resuscitate ancient hatreds.

Rieff urges his readers to think of Ireland where, until very recently, one poet correctly argued that the country 'got martyrs when it needed men'. "Might it not," asks Rieff, "have been better for everyone in the six counties had the wrongs of the past centuries - whether real and imagined, accurately or inaccurately described - instead disappeared from the collective memories of Irish men and women?"

This argument almost flies in the face of those who urge us to remember so that past horrors are not repeated. The Israeli philosopher, Avishai Margalit, has argued for a shared moral memory for humanity as a whole - if only so that moral nightmares, the Holocaust first and foremost among them, shall be remembered and never reoccur. To remember, according to this argument, is to be responsible to the truth if not to 'history'.

Similarly, French philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch argued that whilst history and collective memory can be contested, not to remember would constitute a "shameful amnesia". Holocaust survivor Ellie Wiesel put it another way: "To forget would be absolute injustice in the same way that Auschwitz was the absolute crime. To forget would be the enemy's final triumph."

Not necessarily so, argues Rieff. He says the phrase 'never again' is a noble sentiment but also a wholly unrealistic one. "Auschwitz," he notes, "does not inoculate us against East Pakistan, East Pakistan against Cambodia, Cambodia against Rwanda." To remember these and other catastrophes is to remember how little remembering does to change who we are and what we are capable of.

Remembrance, unlike history is thus about self-love and self-recognition and "proceeds as if gravitationally drawn to suffering, conflict and sacrifice." For the author, one of remembrance's greatest drawbacks is that it is strengthened and sustained by the sense of victimhood. And there is "nothing more socially uncontrollable and, hence, more dangerous politically than a people who believe themselves to be victims." History is littered with the violence and destruction which is a response to such a status. Thus, concludes Rieff, "remembrance may be the friend of justice but it is rarely the friend of peace."

For David Rieff, the important question is not whether to remember, but of what to do with those memories. Truth and Reconciliation commissions such as those in South Africa or Chile were effective precisely because everyone concerned either committed a crime or was the victim of a crime. These countries needed 'an unimpeachable historical record' because their regimes - even at the height of their power - took such pains to commit so many of their crimes in secret and, in the same way the Nazis did, cover up what traces remained when they realised they were about to lose power.

In the final analysis, Rieff is surely correct to argue that politics and history without compromise are invariably totalitarian. Those like the Islamists who tolerate no argument, those who insists they are right and all others are wrong, should fear a book like this. Quoted approvingly by the author, perhaps the final word should go to Nietzsche and his assertion that 'there are no facts, only interpretations'.